Interestingly, perhaps, I can’t find the IRC’s history on its site or elsewhere (and I have to rush away soon, so can’t dig harder). I know I found it in the past, and I’m pretty sure it was on its site, on the About page. I wonder if they’ve…doctored it.

At any rate – this Huge project is Templeton apologetics, yet the CNN article doesn’t mention the fact. Yet fans of Templeton express outrage when anyone says it operates by stealth. Well…what would you call this?

24 Responses to “Stealth”

From 1995 to 2003 the Centre was a beneficiary of the John Templeton Foundation through a grant administered by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley. This provided for regional symposia and international workshops on the teaching of courses in science and religion.

Beth – it’s not a question of blame. It’s a question of what’s going on.

Mind you, I think I can make a case for blaming Templeton, because I’m pretty sure it does a lot of this stuff on purpose. I’ve made the case in earlier posts, I think. But this particular post is just saying what’s going on. Templeton flies under a lot of radar.

I think Trigg and Barrett were very selective in which reporters they spoke with. Remember, these early reports are not by any means based on an official press release distributed to all interested journalists. Instead, Trigg and Barrett appear to have selected two, or perhaps three, journalists for their “release”. And not one of those journalists is a science writer. That in itself seems to indicate their purpose might have been other than to inform their peers in academia. (I would suggest their actual purpose was to control or spin how the findings of the Cognition, Religion and Theology Project will be perceived by the wider public.) So, I do think there might be a sense here in which you can indeed blame Templeton — or at least Trigg and Barrett — to some extent for what CNN’s religion blogger mentions in his article.

I’m not saying you are wrong about what Templeton is doing. I’m saying that this case doesn’t support your contention. It isn’t an example of Templeton being stealthy because they aren’t hiding the fact that they funded the study. They don’t control whether or not CNN provides information about who funded the study.

(I would suggest their actual purpose was to control or spin how the findings of the Cognition, Religion and Theology Project will be perceived by the wider public.)

Yes, it’s all about the spin. This study seems like it only confirms what many atheists (Dennett, Pinker, Bloom, Boyer, Hood, etc.) have been saying all along: religion is explainable as a simplistic continuation of childish intuitions on agency, teleology, and misattributed anthropomorphisms, grounded in the human brain. But finding “natural roots” which cut out the need for the supernatural has to be finessed into looking like the opposite: hey, isn’t that exactly the way God would work it? Wait — what?

That’s where Templeton’s agenda comes in. They are trying to take research and evidence which pretty much undermines spirituality and instead present it as if it supports it. “Natural” = good. Good = God. A victory!

Templeton loves people who will spin the science as pro-religiously as possible despite the scientifically obvious undermining of religion by actual facts. They love people who will say that black is white and night is day, and either lie for Jesus or lie for liars for Jesus.

There’s Elaine Ecklund of course, but a closer analogy to this case is Andrew Newberg, author (with the late Eugene D’Aquili) of Why God Won’t Go Away., and more recently producer of all kinds of religion-is-good-for spin.

In Why God Won’t Go Away, which is really a very interesting book, D’Aquili and Newberg make a very interesting neurophysiological case that the cross-culturally most common kind of “spiritual” religious experience is due to the shutdown of a certain brain region. There’s a another brain region which keeps unconscious track of limb positions, body boundaries, and the positions of nearby objects, and still other brain regions that keep track of parts of the environment further away (e.g., stuff you can see, but can’t reach).

The brain region in question integrates information about near and far objects, producing the conscious impression of a seamless world and your position in it relative to both near and far things. When it shuts down, your brain has difficulty telling where you end and the rest of the universe begins, and also has difficulty distinguishing your ass from your elbows, or your ass from a hole in the ground.

Suddenly you have the classic oceanic feeling of oneness with everything, which mystics and some epileptics report all over the world, in all major religious traditions.

You might think that they would apply the obvious label to this phenomenon. If they’re right, it’s a textbook case of a hallucination. Hallucinations are caused by brain functions going awry, and misinterpreting information, and very often my misinterpreting a lack of information and generating spurious impressions. (Many brain regions are not built to function properly without their usual inputs, and start interpreting silence or random noise as data, such that you get low-level garbage in, and high-level, seemingly very meaningful garbage out.)

But of course, being Templeton-funded pro-religion types, they don’t state this most obvious and basic scientific fact. They don’t call the phenomenon they’re explaining a hallucination, but a form of perception.

That’s just scientifically false. Perception always involves taking some sort of sensory input and processing it to extract higher level information. This isn’t perception at all, because there is no input whatsoever to process, just a lack of input. That lack of input is clearly processed incorrectly, as an input, to give an incorrect percept—that the victim of this brainfart is somehow sensing that they’re importantly one with the universe in a profound way.

They’re refraining from telling people that are clearly hallucinating that they’re hallucinating, and worse, they suggest that these hallucinations are a form of veridical ESP.

They suggest that maybe God put this “capacity” for “perception” in our brains so that we could perceive Him and know deep truth.

Templeton loves that sort of shit. I guess they’ve realized that a lot of inconvenient scientific facts are inevitably going to come out with or without them, and they want their people in there spewing clouds of ink to conceal their significance, so that God can escape the obvious falsifications. They want a whole lot of their people in there, where science and religion conflict most clearly, and most fundamentally, and most dramatically, so that their black-is-white view seems like the dominant, reasonable view among the experts.

And may have enough money to make it happen. A billion and a half dollars will apparently buy a lot of Oxford dons, at least.

Oops, missed an edit-o—that should have just said that they’re refraining from “telling people that they’re hallucinating,” not refraining “telling people that they’re hallucinating that they’re hallucinating.” Sorry for any confusion.

So what contention was this example supposed to support if it wasn’t the contention that Templeton is using stealth?

The last paragraph of your posts reads

At any rate – this Huge project is Templeton apologetics, yet the CNN article doesn’t mention the fact. Yet fans of Templeton express outrage when anyone says it operates by stealth. Well…what would you call this?

I hope you can understand why I thought you felt this was an example of Templeton behaving stealthily.

They don’t call the phenomenon they’re explaining a hallucination, but a form of perception.

That’s just scientifically false. Perception always involves taking some sort of sensory input and processing it to extract higher level information. This isn’t perception at all, because there is no input whatsoever to process, just a lack of input. That lack of input is clearly processed incorrectly, as an input, to give an incorrect percept—that the victim of this brainfart is somehow sensing that they’re importantly one with the universe in a profound way.

What they’re perceiving is their own internal mental states. I suppose you could put it that way, so that the person wandering lost in the Sahara perceives his brain in a state of imagining an oasis, but of course they don’t want to be that clear. Instead, they hint that there may be special Brigadoon-like oases that the privileged can glimpse only after undergoing the rigorous spiritual rituals of extreme heat and water-deprivation while in sacred spots such as deserts. That explanation exists not only as a tantalizing possibility, but a legitimate theory.

I’ve argued with such people and it’s like hitting a brick wall. To them, you are denying the experience. You think the mystics are lying when they say they merged with the universe. They don’t know what they felt. Isn’t it arrogant, to think that people don’t know what they experience for themselves? The concept of a “mistaken interpretation” apparently eludes them. They either can’t, or won’t, parse the difference between a real experience and an experience of something real.

I guess they’ve realized that a lot of inconvenient scientific facts are inevitably going to come out with or without them, and they want their people in there spewing clouds of ink to conceal their significance, so that God can escape the obvious falsifications. They want a whole lot of their people in there, where science and religion conflict most clearly, and most fundamentally, and most dramatically, so that their black-is-white view seems like the dominant, reasonable view among the experts.

The more intelligent the believer, the better they are at figuring out how to move black into a more nuanced gray, and gray then quite naturally fading into white. Faith is a challenge on many levels: intellectual, social, personal. It’s valued for that reason. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have figured out that faith itself challenges honesty.

Turns out that neuroscience, like evolution, only makes God even better. What a surprise.

I’m not sure, though, that it will stick there long. It’s just too easy for them to see how atheists aren’t all that unreasonable when they come up with the contrary interpretation. The Templeton Foundation is doing fingernail apologetics — sharp but brittle little arguments designed to keep you clinging to a cliff you could never have climbed with those fingernails.

Yes ok Beth – fair enough – I did put it that way. But as so often this post is part of a larger conversation, so I suppose I was assuming background knowledge. Your point is accurate as far as it goes.

The Templeton Foundation is doing fingernail apologetics — sharp but brittle little arguments designed to keep you clinging to a cliff you could never have climbed with those fingernails.

Indeed. One of the things that’s important to remember about the entire apologetics industry (an appropriate term given the [financial] figures involved) is that it’s never about persuading people to start believing by presenting them with good arguments for belief, it’s about finding ways to keep those who already believe from succumbing to the arguments against belief.

They’re desperately smearing pseudo-intellectual spackle over the widening cracks in walls built out of sociocultural and/or emotional plaster and hoping it holds together.

The brain region in question integrates information about near and far objects, producing the conscious impression of a seamless world and your position in it relative to both near and far things. When it shuts down, your brain has difficulty telling where you end and the rest of the universe begins, and also has difficulty distinguishing your ass from your elbows, or your ass from a hole in the ground.

In Horgan’s Rational Mysticism this is discussed at length. This phenomenon is also related to transcendental meditation and the out-of-body experience induced when intense or prolonged meditation leads to sensory deprivation. I think it was in How We Believe by Shermer, where the author, a skeptic, describes a first person account of very convincing hallucinations from extreme sleep deprivation.

I think Shermer’s book was Why People Believe Weird Things where he described the “alien abduction” he experienced during a biking event. It’s a good book, especially the paperback edition with the bonus chapter “Why SMART People Believe Weird Things”.